Rails, Streamlined, and DabbleDB

I've been playing a little with Rails over the last week. This is
the first time I really tried to build something I cared about in
Rails as opposed to just running someone else's scripted tutorial.
I'm having fun and I continue to be impressed with its power.

I've reversed roles in this endeavor--one of my grad students, Devlin
Daley, has become the teacher and is kindly answering my questions so
I don't end up stuck in too many places. Today he showed me a couple
of screencasts of data-drive application builders that left me
slack-jawed.

The first was Streamlined, a CRUD
application framework that works on top of Rails to build data-driven
applications with relationships (with Rails, you build all the
relationship data later, after you generate the Rails scaffolding).
Here's the screencast.

The second was dabbledb, an online
data exploration application that anyone who's managed data in a
spreadsheet would love. Importing data from a spreadsheet, you can
incrementally build a relational model of the data. This is what
everyone wishes Access was. Here's the screencast. One
interesting note: I understand that dabbledb is written using Seaside, a SmallTalk-based
application server with continuations.
Cool...

Not too long ago applications ran on one machine and used custom data
formats--if they used data at all. Now most interesting applications
are connected to databases and usually online.